What My Mother Taught Me
by AnnaChase
Summary: A few years back, Lilah just signed her contract with Wolfram & Hart. This story is a little about how she handles the evil she faces there, and how she'd came to not care about it. R&R please!


**What My Mother Taught Me **

It was a warm summer day in 1997 in Los Angeles, California. Most people claimed it to be too warm. All over the town people took days off to either go to the beach and enjoy the tropical temperature or to just lay on their beds and wait till the thermometer showed less than a 90 degrees. It seemed like the best thing to do, but not for everybody. Lilah Morgan didn't have the luxury to take a day off. Not anymore, after recently having signed a contract for a life-and-beyond-lasting job at the law firm Wolfram & Hart. Freshly graduated from law school she'd been eager to start her career, anxious to move up the career ladder one way or another and really become someone. She wasn't sure yet who exactly that 'someone' was supposed to be, but Lilah was sure it couldn't be any worse than the 'no one' she'd been so far.

Most children are supported by their parents and other family members throughout their way to adulthood, and when they finally reach that time they always have those relatives as a safety net to fall back on when things don't work out the way they had expected it to. Lilah had seen it happen with her friends when they started college. Suddenly they were on their own, had to do their own dishes, carried their own responsibilities on their maybe too small and inexperienced shoulders. 99 of the time that didn't work out well, but who cared? They had parents to pick them up from jail, to help them through an alcohol addiction.

Lilah didn't.

She hadn't had anyone helping her reach adulthood. She'd been forced to be an adult when any other girl still played with dolls and borrowed their mother's lipstick. Instead of playing with dolls, Lilah played with empty beer bottles, and played a nurse when her mother was sick, upstairs in her room. Except it wasn't a game, that was the difference.

Lilah's mother was depressed, and she had been so for as long as Lilah and her two year older sister Tamika could remember. During the day she lay in her bed with head aches. She couldn't bear any light, so the curtains were always closed, making the room dark as the night. When Lilah was six years old she'd been afraid of the dark and had been scared to bring her mother her medicine, a strong smelling liquor, yellowish and see-through. She used to take a flashlight with her, then, and sat on the bed with her mother.

'Mommy?', she'd asked in her childish innocence. 'Why are you so sick? Can't the doctor make you better like he did with me when I had the flu last year?'

'No, dear. The doctor can't make mommy better. No one can.', Emily Morgan had replied.

'Why not? He's real smart.'

'Mommy doesn't have the flu, Lilah. Life hasn't been very kind for your mother and did everything to make her end up here.', she said with a bitter look in her eyes.

'Oh..', Lilah said with a nod, although she didn't understand it at all. How could life have put her mother here? She did know one thing for sure, if life would ever be so mean to her, she would make sure she didn't end up in the dark, not like this.

And now she did. Perhaps not in the same room, bed, and alcoholic-scent, but dark it sure was. Did this promise she'd made to herself as a young girl mean nothing to her anymore, or did faith simply make her end up here?

Before Lilah signed the contract she knew Wolfram & Hart wasn't exactly well known for its do-gooders. It was well-known, of course, but mainly for its evil-doers. When she heard that, it had interested her. Would she get to do with blackmail? Illegal cases? That was definitely true, but not in the way she had pictured it. Of demons and vampires and other worlds Lilah had known nothing before she walked in to get a job-interview with Mr. Holland Manners. The half-demon guards behind her had made her swallow, but after a calming glass of water and some soothing words from her boss-to-be she'd been fine again, and 'ready for the job', according to Mr. Manners. And he was right. When she gave it a second thought she hadn't been to surprised at all about the existence of certain none-human things. She'd simply failed to notice them before. Lilah had grown used to demon-clients, magical books, portals and other things previously considered 'mojo' soon enough, what else could she do? She hadn't been hired for nothing, they'd noticed her potential to be someone, and so she would.

Sometimes Lilah thought of what her mother would think of her having this job here. She probably wouldn't care, or suffer from so much self-pity that she wouldn't even notice. And now, she 'couldn't' notice. 3 years ago Emily Morgan had been diagnosed with Alzheimer. In an early state, yes, but that was 3 years ago. Now she was completely in the dark again, but without that scary room with curtains and alcohol-scent. She now staid in the best care-centre there was in America, on her youngest daughter's cost. She had the best room, and private nurses who were there for her 24 hours a day. Sometimes Lilah wondered if it made a difference, she probably didn't notice any of it. But still, it did Lilah's bad conscience some good.

'Good', Lilah thought with a chuckle as she signed a cheque to pay some assassin to kill a group of babies from ex-employees who'd been so stupid to prefer family-life to their career. That wouldn't happen to her, and that promise wasn't a child-made-goal, it was a real promise.

Lilah 'was' someone now. Someone in the dark, perhaps, but that was better than no one at all. She kept that in mind when she stepped into her mother's room that evening, when she finally had a couple of hours off.

'Hello, mother. How are you today?', she sat down by the old lady who was staring at an old photograph of herself and her two daughters.

'Who are these people?', Emily asked.

'That's us, mother. Come on, let me help you to bed, it's late.' Lilah walked her mother over to the bed and helped her lay down. After that, she closed the curtains and smiled. Sometimes being in the dark wasn't so bad.

Lilah no longer used a flashlight, she loved the dark now.

Her mother had taught her to.


End file.
